I might have some stuff to add to this thread soon. My wife has just had a baby at 30 and a half weeks. :eek:
Squee! Doper baby! How big? Boy? Girl? Pictures?
Hang in there, Colophon. If you need to “talk”, PM me.
I was 5 pounds 12 oz, and I was due 03/31/74, born on 02/25/1974.
I had strep often and pneumonia 3 times a kid, but I am fine and have been since 7 or so forward!
I have something in my eye now. What amazing little girls!
How’s it going, ZipperJJ?
Colophon, congrats to you and the wife! Yours is the third preemie I heard about in the past week only I can’t remember tho the other was…geez!
Here’s the latest on Jack, now a week old. IMHO he’s growing up like nobody’s business!
I was born at 35 weeks. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t able to get a Ph.D. in astronomy. I’m also overweight, but if you look at other members of my family, you see that genetics and childhood environment are other plausible explanations for that.
I know, there are mothers of preemies who would love to hear that their kid would be alive at 36 and complaining about that kind of thing.
There are a lot of premature babies around here, aren’t there! I was born at 24 and a half weeks and had to have heart surgery to close a valve that didn’t have time to close itself properly. I haven’t had any trouble since then, though. (Well, I’m massively uncoordinated, but I tend to suspect I’m just clumsy, rather than blaming it on being born early.)
I’ve managed to get an MA and hold down employment and stuff (and I’m oh, so articulate, clearly - blame it on the flu it feels like I’m coming down with, please…) and I shall keep my fingers crossed that Jack and his family have a similarly smooth future. He’s adorable! I’m sure things will be fine for them.
Squeeeeeeeeee!
I don’t care what They say about infant development, that’s a “real smile”, that is! 
My BFF was born 8 months after her parents’ wedding, leading to much snickering among the women of BFF father’s village about that “hoity toity bit city girl, looks like she wasn’t as square as she wanted to seem after all”. “You’d think those bitches have never heard of sietemesinos!” (lit. ‘seven-monthers’) is BFF-mother’s still-heavily-enraged response. BFF was small enough that her parents were warned she might not survive, but if she managed to survive for 3 days or so it would be fine. She’s now a doctor, still in her first job as medical director of an old folks’ home / hospital, and the proud mom of 3 fine daughters.
The Irish Twins in our year were born less than 9 months apart. During sex ed class, when the teacher asked about “sex myths”, one of them offered “it’s not true that you can’t get pregnant if you’re breastfeeding! We’re proof!”
Both cases are from 1968, incubators weren’t even available in the area AFAIK, and both developed normally.
^that should’a been “hoity toity big city girl”. Are too many Ts bad for you?
Fantastic info from WhyNot, whose daughter was born right on the cusp of what they even consider survivable. Many babies born that early either don’t make it, or are profoundly handicapped in some way.
At “only” 5 weeks early, yep - most babies are “feeders and growers”. Some barely spend any time at all in the NICU. Obviously there’s the occasional outlier - my obstetrician mentioned a case where a baby was born at 37 weeks and died of complications of prematurity, however that’s stunningly rare to have that kind of problem.
A friend of mine had a 5-week preemie who did spend most of a week in the NICU - he was doing fine, but was very small for his age (intrauterine growth retardation, he was 4 lb 5 oz) and they wanted to observe him.
My Moon Unit was 6 weeks early. She was perfectly happy and growing well where she was, but my body decided that it didn’t much care to survive the rest of the pregnancy, so they delivered her. No time to do steroids to mature her lungs, which for kids that age is the most common serious complation.
So she wound up springing a leak in one lung, the lung collapsed, they put in a chest tube to drain the air from the chest cavity, put in a high frequence / low pressure oscillating ventilator tube for a few days, gave her 2 doses of artificial surfactant (something they didn’t have 10 years before) - and at 14 the only lingering problem she has is mild asthma. This was expected - preemies who’ve been on a vent have a higher incidence, plus there’s family history.
For your friends: As with any newborn, they’ll be preoccupied with looking after the baby and won’t have time for things like making meals, running routine household errands, walk the dog, clean the birdcage, throw in a load of laundry etc. Do some of those things for them. Especially while baby is in the hospital, they’ll be spending a lot of time there even after Mom is discharged.
At only 5 weeks early, the baby probably won’t need much in the way of preemie-sized clothes - baby doesn’t care if her newborn-size things are a little baggy!
Breastfeeding support:
If the hospital is having trouble scaring up a breastpump, you could go out and get one for them. Medela and Aveda are both good brands - don’t go with Gerber or whatever you get at the drugstore. When Moon Unit was in the hospital they got me a breastpump that day - but were grateful when I was able to get hold of my rental-grade pump (that had been on loan to a friend) - because that meant it freed up their pump for another new mother.
The baby will most likely have trouble nursing at first - they’re just too weak at that age. So anything you can do to support mom in getting that colostrum out is good. I found the NICU staff not as supportive as they might have been - one doctor insisted there was no such thing as nipple confusion, and another one deliberately tried to make me feel like I wanted to endanger the baby by trying alternate feeding mechanisms. I was able to overcome all that, a few weeks after she was discharged, but to this day I am certain she learned to breastfeed DESPITE the hospital’s “care”. If this were my first baby, I wouldn’t have known where to get help and she’d have wound up a formula baby.
Your friend may of course have done sufficient research on her own to know where to get help, but if she asks, you can dig up all sorts of info on the web, find a local lactation consultant (the hospital should have one on staff but that may or may not be helpful). The funniest thing about it with me: I saw 2 different LCs in the hospital, 1 privately… and what worked? Something I’d stumbled across on the net BEFORE the baby was born.
The biggest thing lactation wise that I wish someone had mentioned to me (and now it’s too late for your friend as well, because I forgot to mention it to you :smack:) is that colostrum doesn’t look a thing like milk. It’s golden yellow, totally see through and watery and you may only get 2 or 3 mL of it with the pump. Which I thought meant it was puss or something, so I threw it away the first day. :smack: